Notes

give the people what they want

it's my whole operating philosophy and it fits on a bumper sticker.

the value. the experience. their time back. something off their plate. whatever job they actually hired your product to do — give them that, and get out of the way.

most growth problems i've diagnosed are some version of a company standing between users and the thing those users came for. a form that didn't need 9 fields. an upgrade wall in front of the aha moment. a "book a demo" button on a product that sells itself.

we call it strategy. the user calls it friction.

stop negotiating with people about what they want. they already told you. it's in the data, it's in the support tickets, it's in the rage clicks.

give the people what they want.

your engineers should know why people buy

plg fails as a marketing project. it works as a company posture.

here's the test: ask an engineer on the team what pain point the thing they're building this sprint solves, and why the customer would pay for it. if the answer is a ticket number... that's the gap.

i don't say this to dunk on engineering — they're usually the last people handed customer context, and that's a leadership choice, not an engineering one. but a product-led motion means the product is doing the selling. and you can't sell what you don't understand.

the best version of this i've seen: customer pain points and the "why" behind the roadmap shared with the whole team, support tickets readable by anyone, session recordings in the all-hands. cheap to do. almost nobody does it.

if only marketing knows the customer, you don't have a product-led company. you have a marketing team with a product attached. 🙃

we're not building for our customers

strong claim, i know. but look at the average roadmap and then look at what users are actually trying to get done... and tell me those two lists match.

jobs-to-be-done isn't a workshop you run once a year. it's the directive. the job the user is hiring you for should be the thing the product ships toward and the thing the marketing motion sells. when those three drift apart — job, roadmap, message — you get products nobody asked for, marketed with stories nobody believes.

the drift never announces itself. it shows up as "weird" metrics. activation that won't move. feature adoption nobody can explain. churn surveys that say "just didn't use it."

the fix isn't more research decks. it's shorter distance between the people who hear the customer and the people who decide what gets built.